“What about his friends?”

“John, Beyo, and Marcus,” she said. “His own little gang.”

“He was in charge?” I asked, reading her tone.

“Oh yeah. Zane doesn’t take instruction well; he decides. And the others are basically zeta males. They’d do whatever Zane said.”

Connor looked away for a moment, gazed at the water, brow furrowed as if considering . . . or deciding, before shifting his gaze back to her. “Evelyn, I’m going to level with you—I think your brother is involved in the attacks on Loren and on the bonfire. We need to find him before anyone else is hurt.”

She just looked at him, expression blank. “I can’t say I’m surprised. But I honestly don’t know where he is. You could ask his friends, but even if they knew, they wouldn’t tell you.”

And presuming they were here, I thought, and not with Zane. Given the attack had involved multiple creatures, the latter seemed more likely.

“Do you think your mom would let us look through his room?” I asked.

“Oh. Um, she probably wouldn’t.” Evelyn smiled, and there was nothing happy about it. “But I pay the rent, and I will.”

* * *

* * *

“Zane borrowed something of mine,” Evelyn threw out as we passed her mother, still on the couch, now with a beer in one hand and a screen in the other.

We followed her down the hallway, passing a small bathroom cluttered with knickknacks to a bedroom on the left. She opened the door, and the smell of unwashed sheets and stale beer wafted out.

“He’s classy,” Evelyn said, surveying the carnage.

I’d have said it looked like someone had tossed the room, except that I suspected that was its normal state. There were a small bed, a bureau, a nightstand, a desk. An entertainment screen and a closet with two sliding doors. There were clothes everywhere—socks on the floor, jeans across the bed, a pile of shirts in a laundry basket, a pile of everything spilling out from the closet floor. Empty beer bottles stood in groups in the few empty spaces not covered with clothes, like bowling pins waiting for the roll.

This was a far cry from Georgia’s cabin or ours, from the house Marian and Arne shared. And farther still from the Pack’s Chicago HQ.

“I’ll wait outside,” Evelyn said, and left us alone.

“Thoughts?” I asked. “Hazmat suits?”

“What a fucking mess,” Connor muttered, and I had the sense he wasn’t just talking about the debris field.

“Yeah.” Giving up any hope that I’d walk out of this room without needing a shower, I dived in.

The bureau was closest, so I went there first, picked through the detritus with a fingertip. There were coins and credit tokens, pieces of gum, pens, peanut shells, and crumbs (assorted). No wallet, no notepad with scribbled secrets, no magic potion.

“He’s a pig,” I said.

“No argument.” Connor flipped back the blankets on the bed, throwing discarded clothes and funk into the air.

I opened a few drawers, found them mostly empty but for a random T-shirt here and there. Not surprising, given most of the clothes were on the floor.

While Connor kicked through the stuff on the floor, I walked over to the desk. Here, there were glimmers of the boy Zane had been. A small yellow car, a baseball, a scouting pin, all of it scattered with the same garbage as the bureau.

I unwadded a ball of paper, scanned an old-fashioned receipt, the kind handwritten on a carbon paper pad. The store’s name was printed on the receipt, the amount listed but the items identified only as “Misc.”

“Have you ever been to the Crystal Inferno?” I asked him.

“Not that I’m aware of. What is it?”

“Looks like a store in town. A few weeks ago, Zane spent four hundred bucks there. Or he has the receipt of someone else who did.”

Frowning, Connor came around the bed, glanced at the receipt I held out. “What the hell does this guy want with crystals?”

“Maybe that’s his latest obsession,” I said. “But if he bought crystals, where are they?”

“That’s a very good question,” Connor said, glancing around. “You find anything else?”

“No. But I haven’t gone into the closet. I’m not brave enough.”

He chuckled. “Let’s start with the receipt and see how far we go.”

We walked back into the living room. “Have you ever been to the Crystal Inferno?” Connor asked Jude.

She snorted. “I’m not wasting money on hippie crystals and herbs. We’re already magic. Don’t need any of that nonsense.”

I guessed she wasn’t aware her son’s feelings were different.

“Then we’ll thank you for your time and get out of your hair.”

“Sure, chief,” she said, and lifted her bottle in salute.

* * *

* * *

We met Alexei in a plot of green between the Williams house and our cabin.

“Anything?” Connor asked.

Alexei shook his head. “Gone. Cabin’s a mess, small for the three of them, and needed airing out. It was disgusting, but they haven’t been there in a few days. Smelled musty. Milk’s spoiled. I dug around, didn’t find anything that indicated where they might be or how they’re making the transformation. You find anything?”

“Nothing about where they are or what they’re doing,” Connor said. “Zane’s a punk—and not in the charming way I was a punk,” he added for my benefit. “Family confirms he’s a troublemaker, gets fixated on things, and leads the others around.”

“We did find this,” I said, and offered him the receipt.

Alexei’s brows lifted. “Who spends four hundred bucks at a place called the Crystal Inferno?”

“Someone buying magic supplies?” Connor offered.

Alexei nodded. “That could work. You going to check it out?”

“Yeah. Maybe we can nail down their location. In the meantime, can you talk to Georgia? Presuming Traeger’s right about the ‘clubhouse’ being out in the woods, the clan needs to get people out there looking, searching.”

Alexei nodded. “Fat chance, but I’ll ask.”

“We’ll meet you back at the cabin,” Connor said. “Be careful out there.”

“Same to you,” Alexei said, then slid his gaze to me. “And be careful with that damn sword.”

* * *

* * *

  We walked back to the cabin to get the bike for the drive into town. Connor rolled his neck and shoulders as we walked, as if fighting back tension.

“Are you okay?”

“Frustrated,” he said. “Shifters are allowed to live their lives without worrying about politics, drama. But there comes a point where it just seems they’ve stuck their heads into the sand. It makes me . . . punchy.”

“Would you like to spar? I’d give you a fighting chance.”

Connor snorted. “I’ve already seen what happens when we spar, brat. And we’ve got work to do.”

I couldn’t really disagree with that.

The drama notwithstanding, it was a beautiful night for a drive. Clear and just breezy enough. We took the old main road toward town, then veered away from the shore into the set of tidy blocks where the courthouse and post office stood. The Crystal Inferno sat at the end of the road, the slender bookend in a row of buildings that included a bar and a bank.

The store name blinked in neon letters, a crystal ball among them. It lit in stages: bottom, middle, top. Bottom, middle, top, the neon buzzing quietly in the darkness. It was late, but the store was still bright despite the hour, either for the thrill of humans dipping a toe into the occult in darkness or for the Supernaturals who apparently shopped here. Crystals hung from strings in the windows that flanked the door, and the shelves were well stocked.

“Ready?” Connor asked.

“Yep. We playing humans or ourselves?”

His smile was a little bit feral. “Oh, ourselves. Feel free to be scary if you need to.”

Jude hadn’t been far off. There was plenty of hippie in the Crystal Inferno, from guides to joining the world’s consciousness to dreaming your way to happiness and wealth. There were lotions and oils, crystals and geodes, and a small selection of health food staples intended, according to the sign, to “increase the body conscious,” whatever that meant. A woman sang in Gaelic on the store’s speakers, and the air smelled like patchouli and pepper.

And beneath all the trappings was the subtle buzz of magic.

“Good evening,” said a cheerful voice from somewhere deeper in the store. We followed it to the counter, where a woman with tan skin and dark hair used a scoop to portion dark seeds into small glass jars.

She was tall and curvy, her eyes wide and dark, her mouth generous. She wore a flowy dress with wide sleeves and a V-neck in a floral pattern, and her nails were carefully manicured in pastel pink.

Not a shifter, not a vampire. A sorceress. Bingo.

“Welcome,” she said, without looking up. “Feel free to browse, or let me know if I can assist you. We have palm reading appointments for tomorrow, but none left tonight, I’m afraid.”

She looked up, and her eyes went wide. “Well, well,” she said with a laugh, and put down the scoop. “You aren’t who I expected to see tonight. Connor Keene and Elisa Sullivan. I know you from TV, the screen,” she said. “What brings you to our little backwater?”

“Family” was all Connor said. “And you are?”

“I’m Paloma,” she said, and began to screw tiny lids onto the tiny jars. “We don’t have any blood, but we’ve got some nice kombucha.”

“We’re actually just here for information,” he said.

“Information? About what?”

“Let’s start with why a sorceress is holding court at a shop in a backwater.”